Jeroen Dijsselbloem spoke at a news conference after being re-elected for a second term as president of the Eurogroup on Monday in Brussels. Thierry Charlier/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images The following is a full transcript of The Wall Street Journal’s interview with Jeroen Dijsselbloem—Dutch finance chief and president of the eurozone finance ministers’ group—on the race to [...] Read More »

Reaction to the outcome of Greece’s referendum over its international bailout plan will likely dominate the week and could shed further light as to whether Athens could clinch a third bailout from its creditors or whether it may be one step closer to having to exit from the eurozone.

Members of the European Parliament meet in Strasbourg where they’ll vote on their recommendations for the ongoing free trade negotiations between the U.S. and the European Union and where they’ll discuss the issues of Greece, migration and security with the EU’s top leaders.

Also next week, the European Court of Justice rules on a case involving civic integration exams while Europe commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Srebenica massacre.

Over the jump, five things to watch for in the week ahead. Read More »

European lawmakers will debate on aviation safety following the March Germanwings jet crash, a European parliamentary committee will vote on procedures regarding the Parliament’s recommendations for the U.S.-EU free trade negotiations while Luxembourg will formally take over the rotating presidency of the European Union. Read More »

Brussels has grown wearily accustomed to last-ditch Greek talks over the past five years but there is a growing sense that this week might really be the last-chance saloon.

Greece owes €1.6 billion to the International Monetary Fund by the end of June and risks a debt default and capital controls unless it can reach a deal with its international creditors to unlock further aid. But Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s government has consistently rejected key demands of the creditors, including further cuts to pensions.

Eurozone ministers will meet in Brussels on Monday after failing to reach a deal in Luxembourg last week, to prepare the ground for a meeting of their leaders later in the day. Leaders from the wider EU will gather later in the week for a regular meeting that could be the final chance to strike a deal.

Besides Greece, the region’s escalating migration crisis is high on the agenda this week, and will be discussed separately by foreign ministers and leaders. U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron will also seize the opportunity of the summit to outline his proposals for a reform of the EU, after his party’s unexpected triumph in national elections in May put a U.K. referendum on its membership of the bloc firmly on the agenda.

Elsewhere, the European Parliament will hold its plenary session in Brussels and will vote on the bloc’s €315 billion investment fund and on Wednesday and Thursday, defense ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization meet in Brussels.

When ambassadors from the European Union’s 28 countries first discussed a proposal for binding quotas to spread the burden of handling refugees more evenly across the bloc, the session soon turned into a shouting match.

“It was a very heated debate, at times with abstruse arguments,” said one of the participants to the Friday meeting.

On one hand, there are Italy and Greece, strongly pushing for the rest of the bloc to come to their rescue, as over 100,000 migrants have arrived this year across the Mediterranean; their overstretched systems cannot cope with all of them. Read More »

If Greece wants to avoid defaulting on its debts, a deal has to be found within days. But back-of-the-envelope calculations by Real Time Brussels show that the Athens government and its creditors may have until the winter to seal a third bailout deal for the country.

Here is how:

Greece’s decision last week to bundle this month’s payments to the International Monetary Fund means its first major redemption, €1.6 billion, is on June 30. That’s why we expect a “staff-level agreement” on budget cuts and overhauls between Athens and the institutions overseeing its bailoutby the June 18 Eurogroup at the latest. If both debtor and creditors want to avoid calling the German Bundestag back for an extra session, a deal could be preliminarily approved at a special Eurogroup this weekend. Read More »

In the coming week, finance ministers and central bank chiefs from the world’s seven leading economies meet in Germany and European lawmakers vote on the bloc’s strategy in trade negotiations with the U.S. and on rules curbing risk-taking in banks that are too-big-to-fail. Meanwhile, Greece is set to once again dominate news as negotiations between the debt-stricken country and its international creditors continue, in search of a deal that would allow it to access desperately needed cash. The week starts with a holiday on Monday across much of continental Europe, the U.K. and the U.S. David Cameron will host European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at Chequers, the country residence of British prime ministers. There they will talk over plans to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU, the subject of trips he plans to make later in the week to Berlin and Paris. Here are five things to watch in the week ahead. Read More »

In this week’s Brussels Beat column, we discussed a possible solution to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s pledge to renegotiate the U.K.’s relationship with the European Union — given that a major overhaul of the EU treaty is impossible before the “in-out” referendum due by the end of 2017. In an interview Thursday with Alex Barker of the Financial Times, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond noticeably didn’t repeat his boss’s call made before the election for a “proper, full-on treaty change.”

But if the “Danish solution” we discuss in the column is a possible “how,” Brussels is also occupied with the “who.” Who will be the central players in the negotiations on this side of the English Channel? Who in Brussels will take the “Brexit” — British Exit” — file, as it is being casually referred to in the corridors of EU power?

Top billing for the week ahead in the European Union is for the bloc’s summit meeting with Ukraine which takes place in Kiev on Monday. It’s the first formal summit since the crisis in Ukraine erupted last spring when Russian forces annexed Crimea.

Officials acknowledge it comes at a time of rising strains between Brussels and Kiev with the EU seeming unlikely to grant Ukraine’s requests for rapid progress on a visa-access deal, EU peacekeepers for eastern Ukraine or President Petro Poroshenko’s plea to open up a path for eventual EU membership for his country.

President Jean-Claude Juncker, European Council President Donald Tusk and a host of other top EU officials will make the trip.

Here are some of the other main events on the schedule in the week ahead. Read More »

The European Union should protect its borders against immigration using military force because it doesn’t need new migrants, Hungary’s prime minister said the day after EU leaders agreed to increase funding to keep migrants from dying while trying to cross the Mediterranean.

The leaders of the 28-nation EU agreed in Brussels on Thursday to triple funding for patrols in the Mediterranean after hundreds of people drowned in one of the deadliest migrant shipwrecks on the Mediterranean in recent days.

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban urged even more action.

“Europe’s borders must be protected. We cannot be like a piece of cheese with holes in it so that they [immigrants] can be crossing in and out. Serious police and military steps must be taken and also steps that they would remain at home,” Mr. Orban said in an interview on state radio on Friday. Read More »

About Real Time Brussels

The Wall Street Journal’s Brussels blog is produced by the Brussels bureau of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. The bureau has been headed since 2009 by Stephen Fidler, who was previously a correspondent and editor for the Financial Times and Reuters. Also posting regularly: Matthew Dalton, Viktoria Dendrinou, Tom Fairless, Naftali Bendavid, Laurence Norman, Gabriele Steinhauser and Valentina Pop.